Podcast Notes Playlist: Startup

How much does knowledge cost? While that sounds like an abstract question, the answer is surprisingly specific: $3,096,988,440.00. That’s how much the business of publishing scientific and academic research is worth. 

This is the story of one woman’s battle against a global network of academic journals that underlie published scientific research. In 2011, Alexandra Elbakyan had just moved home to Kazakhstan after a disappointing few years trying to study neuroscience in the United States when she landed on an internet forum where a bunch of scientists were all looking for the same thing: access to academic journal articles that were behind paywalls. That’s the moment the very simple, but enormously powerful, website called Sci Hub was born. 

The site holds over 88 million articles and serves up about a million downloads to people in practically every country on the globe. We travel to Kazakhstan to meet the mysterious woman behind it all and to find out what it takes to make everything we know about anything available to anyone anywhere, for free.Special thanks to Vrindra Bhandari, Balázs Bodó, Stephen Buranyi, Ian Graber-Stiehl, Joel Joseph, Noorain Khalifa, Aparajita Lath, Steve McLaughlin, Marcia McNutt, Randy Scheckman Tanmay Singh, Deborah Harkness, Joe Karaganis, Lawrence Lessig, Glyn Moody, and Steven Press.

Episode Credits:Reported by - Eli CohenReporting help from - Karishma Mehrotra, Emily Krumberger and Norihelys RamosProduced by Simon Adlerwith help from - Eli CohenOriginal music and sound designed by - Simon AdlerMixing by - Jeremy BloomEdited by - Alex Neason

Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!

Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.

Radiolab is on YouTube! Catch up with new episodes and hear classics from our archive. Plus, find other cool things we did in the past — like miniseries, music videos, short films and animations, behind-the-scenes features, Radiolab live shows, and more. Take a look, explore and subscribe!

Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected].

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

• People live out all of the potential downsides in the mere reflection of what other people will think about them in the future, should they fail
• Shame only exists in the shadows; identify when you have the hesitation to confront something and ask yourself why you may be experiencing that hesitation
• The difference between successful people and the most successful people is that the most successful people say no to almost everything 
• Success comes down to doing the obvious thing for an extraordinary period of time without convincing yourself that you are smarter than you are 
• The first step to achieving a massive dream is conquering tiny impulses 
• Opportunities only look like opportunities in the rear-view mirror; today, they only seem like risk 
• Most of the pain that people experience is purely in their own minds
• There is always someone who has had it worse and has done it better 
• Power follows the blame finger: you give power to wherever you point the blame to
• Pain moves people far more effectively than pleasure does
• We commonly sacrifice the thing we want for the thing that is supposed to get it  
• Three most common traits that hyper-successful people have: a superiority complex, insecurity, and impulse control 
• What is the thing that you can do longer than anyone else where to them it looks like work, and to you, feels like play? 
• Constantly ask yourself: “What are we optimizing for?”
• Try to be directionally correct instead of trying to be absolutely correct    

Alex Hormozi is a founder, investor and an author.

Alex's Twitter has been one of my favourite sources of great insights over the last year. Today we get to go through some of my favourite lessons from him about life, human behaviour, psychology, business and resilience. This is really good.

Expect to learn how your ego is keeping you poor, why you never need to care about what anyone else thinks of you, why having a life that sucks is actually a blessing, whether most easy opportunities are just distractions, how to conquer your tiny impulses, why you are built to deal with things being hard, how to beat anyone who ever copies you and much more...

Sponsors:

Website in 10 MINUTES, no coding skills required: https://hostinger.com/modernwisdom (code MODERNWISDOM for 10% off)

Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://craftd.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15)

Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied)

Extra Stuff:

Follow Alex on Twitter - https://twitter.com/AlexHormozi

Follow Alex on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/hormozi/ 

Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/

To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom

-

Get in touch.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast

Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ 

Keith is the CEO & Co-Founder of OpenStore and a General Partner at Founders Fund. He is an experienced technology executive and entrepreneur, a prolific investor, and a self-described contrarian. Keith previously served as a General Partner at Khosla Ventures. Before that, he was COO at Square and served in influential roles at LinkedIn. He also co-founded Opendoor. Keith began his career in technology as a senior executive at PayPal. He has since invested early in many great companies including YouTube, Airbnb, Palantir, DoorDash, Stripe, Quora, Yammer, Affirm, Eventbrite, and many others. He also served as a Board Member from inception to IPO at Yelp and Xoom. Follow Keith on Twitter @rabois.

[0:00] - OpenStore's early momentum and fundraising strategy

[5:35] - How an decentralized department store could unlock eCommerce growth

[12:33] - Introducing OpenStore Drive and why it is great for Shopify store owners

[16:49] - OpenStore's horizontal approach and why Keith believes it is best

[18:41] - OpenStore’s business acquisition strategy and thoughtful process design

[24:09] - How learnings from OpenStore’s initial acquisitions have led to improvements

[28:56] - Why OpenStore’s business is resilient in various macroeconomic environments

[35:06] - Acquisition offers and accept rates as metrics and countermetrics at OpenStore

[38:45] - Introducing Gumdrop which matches long-tail influencers to long-tail SKUs

[41:40] - The advantages of aggregation that benefit OpenStore’s business model

[45:19] - Building a great company culture; finding & developing undiscovered talent

[51:11] - The most high-leverage activities Keith allocates time to as OpenStore's CEO

homeofjake.com

• Many of the high-margin software businesses have no impact on society, and sometimes can even have a negative impact on society 
• Founders in the dynamism category are creating teams that are mission-oriented and interested in more than just making money; they want to build techno-optimist solutions for strategically important problems 
• It is important for society’s best players to choose good quests
• It is best to lean into your passions and overinvest in them 
• We must encourage people to be “spikey” instead of only encouraging them to be “well-rounded”  
• In his early days at Founder Fund, Trae was looking to invest in a 21st-century reboot of Lockheed Martin; it did not exist, so he started it 
• If a company is going to work, each team member must leverage their own superpower to achieve the company’s audacious goal 
• The adversary must know that Anduril’s product will prevent their offensive from happening and that the defensive cost to prevent it is far lower than the offensive cost to launch it  
• “The DoD has done a really good job at creating theater around their innovation efforts.” – Trae Stephens 
• The big defense primes are effectively government agencies that respond to the incentives presented to them 
• Mimetic desire is the primary motivation for conflict in society because we are all going after the scarce resources that other people want  
• Working and learning about an industry in a supporting role is 100x better than graduate school
• The first question that Trae Stephens asks in every pitch meeting is: “What is the origin story of this business?”
• Ask yourself what you are uniquely suited to do to contribute to a greater good
• We lose the wonders of virtue when we rely on ourselves as the source of all truth 

My guest this week is Trae Stephens. Trae is a partner at Founders Fund and co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril. Trae’s philosophy can be boiled down to finding good quests, which has led him to investing in businesses that work closely with the government on societally important issues. Clearly, that extends to co-founding Anduril and I would highly recommend listening to my Business Breakdowns episode on Anduril if you haven’t already. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of lobbyists, why the high-tech defense firms of the past became stale, and how he hunts for disagreeableness in founders. Please enjoy my conversation with Trae Stephens.

For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.

Listen to Founders Podcast

Founders Episode 136 - Estee Lauder

Founders Episode 288 - Ralph Lauren

-----

This episode is brought to you by Tegus, the modern research platform for leading investors. I’m a longtime user and advocate of Tegus, a company that I’ve been so consistently impressed with that last fall my firm, Positive Sum, invested $20M to support Tegus’ mission to expand its product ecosystem. Whether it’s quantitative analysis, company disclosures, management presentations, earnings calls - Tegus has tools for every step of your investment research. They even have over 4000 fully driveable financial models. Tegus’ maniacal focus on quality, as well as its depth, breadth and recency of content makes it the one-stop, end-to-end research platform for investors. Move faster, gather deep research to build conviction and surface high-quality, alpha-driving insights to find your differentiated edge with Tegus. As a listener, you can take the Tegus platform for a free test drive by visiting tegus.co/patrick.

-----

Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. 

Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.

Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.

Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus

Show Notes

[00:03:17] - [First question] - Why Trae thinks most high-margin businesses are bad for society

[00:04:28] - What would he change to impact energy technology most if he were in charge

[00:06:18] - His investing focus on dynamism and mission-driven tech companies

[00:09:42] - Analyzing why relatively few people strive to make society-level advancements

[00:11:35] - What he’s done as a parent to enable his kids to develop passions

[00:12:41] - The most noteworthy adventures in his career

[00:14:41] - Founding Anduril and what it taught him about the tech industry

[00:18:40] - The cutting-edge of defense technologies today

[00:21:29] - What Shyam Sankar of Palantir taught him about defense tech

[00:23:34] - Why some of the biggest defense tech companies have stopped innovating

[00:28:29] - What he and Anduril have learned about sales and scaling in the public sector

[00:32:12] - Where lobbyists and decision makers play in to defense tech business models

[00:35:22] - His take on Peter Thiel’s notion that competition should be avoided

[00:38:24] - The importance of being psychologically disagreeable when building a start-up

[00:39:54] - The origin story that stands out the most from companies he has interviewed

[00:41:12] - How he developed an investor mindset on his unorthodox path to the venture world

[00:43:57] - What he has learned from playing supporting roles and aligning with great leaders

[00:46:11] - Important but uncommon lessons about entrepreneurship

[00:48:21] - Venture investing lessons he’s learned from Lauren Gross

[00:50:00] - His first VR project and aspirations for the future of VR

[00:54:50] - The role of religion and spirituality in his business philosophies

[00:59:13] - Why he tries to capitalize on morality as opposed to sin

[01:03:57] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him

Mike Cessario is the Founder and CEO @ Liquid Death, the man hacking the healthy beverage market with the first hilarious water brand. It is working, Liquid Death's latest valuation was over a staggering $700M and Mike has raised over $200M since founding the company from the likes of Science Inc. Away's Jen Rubio, Dollar Shave Club's Michael Dubin, Swedish House Mafia and Tony Hawk to name a few. Prior to founding Liquid Death, Mike was in the advertising industry at a number of dirrect firms including VaynerMedia.

1.) From Canned Water to $700M Business:

• How did rockstars' hydration problems lead to the founding of Liquid Death?
• How did growing up with guns and heroine needles around him at school, impact how Mike sees the world today? What is he running from? What is he running towards?
• Everyone said, "canned water, that is a stupid idea". What does Mike tell to all entrepreneurs who are told their idea is stupid? How does Mike advise on picking your idea?

2.) How to Build a Truly Great Brand:

• What does the term "brand" mean to Mike?
• What does he mean when he says, "truly great brand transcends functional value"?
• What are the single biggest mistakes Mike sees founders make today on branding?
• Why does Mike believe people will always hate your brand, if it is good?
• What are the biggest brand mistakes Mike has made with Liquid Death?
• What brand does Mike most respect and admire? Why that brand?

3.) Marketing: The Secret to Reaching Millions of People with Little Budget:

• How does the Liquid Death team come up with the ideas they have for content? Why does Mike believe the label "storytelling" is kinda BS?
• Why does Mike believe people will always hate your marketing? What was Mike's biggest lesson from their Superbowl commercial with kids drinking Liquid Death, looking like beer?
• How does Mike decide which channel to prioritise? How has the rise of TikTok and short form video changed their approach to content?
• How does Mike approach resource allocation for new pieces of content? Do they spend big on few bits of content or spend little on many and see what works?